To decrypt, enter "TheHunHunterTexas" (mods, I do not use this passphrase anywhere, but I do not feel lime uploading 250MB again just to remove the password, so if you can, let it be here visible to everyone)

also, if you would like to contribute to expand this to worldwide scale, just ring the bell!

I have been working on a big big scenery lately, covering Western Europe with OSM vector data for coastlines, roads, lakes and even some VTP land class (for urbanized areas)...

The scenery covers all western Europe (the EURW area of FS9) from Portugal to just east of Italy. Resolution is at about 1point/10m, for roads, coastlines, rivers, railroads, power lines and VTP urban area polygons!

Here Some screenshots so you know what you are testing!

Reykjavik, Iceland

Innsbruk, Austria

Genova, Italy

Note that I have a variety of freeware texture add-ons and a (free) global SRTM mesh...

If interested, respond to the topic and you will obtain the dropbox link and the decryption password via PM.

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No need for you to know European topology here! The beta testing is for major issue finding, e.g. crashes, and bad graphical problems (bad vector files can cause terrain mesh to go insane and look like it came out of the "Lord Of The rings" for instance... astronomical height spikes and sinkholes...

If you find something that looks abnormal you report it here! Just make sure it does not belong to the above list... also i am interested in performance impact!

I'll PM you the link if you think you can be useful! all you need to do is fly around Europe and have fun! just plan your normal flight, and be attentive to the scenery!

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I think UTE runs roads, river, coastlines. They of course appear to use high-end data sources from TeleATLAS (that I cannot beat), but I do not think they turned land use polygons into vector land class data for city areas. This may cause road groupings apparently in the middle of nowhere. using this VTP trick, OSM data allows to place urban areas with a resolution of 10m/point. Roads now make sense almost everywhere (OSM is not perfect) and city areas are no longer defined at a meager 1Km*1Km resolution available via Landclass. Nevertheless, the two are comparable products. This one hopefully is compiled from newer data!

You have railroads and powerlines too... Most specially, UTE is $40 worth, this is a low-cost alternative at a projected $10

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Who needs FSX?? ;-) It looks very nice and together with FS9 Evolution textures creates a completely new FS9, FS9.6 one might say. It makes FS9 VFR ready.

Performance is very good (even on my Macbook Air), it only takes slightly longer to load than usual.

Here are the issues / non-issues, none of it is a dealbreaker:

1. Issue: The file EURW_22_Libobj_excl.bgl (In OSM WORLD 1 CORE/SCENERY) excludes all library objects including those of the default airports. Turning it off and leaving the other file activated solves this issue, but I wonder for what do you need to exclude the library objects in the first place? The file does not influence the appearance of addon airports (at least as far as I tested it)

2. A base landclass is still required which is no big deal of course as creating a brand new landclass is a time consuming task. For Germany I am using Landscape Germany which is fine. It mixes however the landuse polygons of OSM World with those landclasses defined in the custom landclass file. A possible solution would be, since urban and industrial landclass is no longer required to be in a landclassification file, to provide a basic landclass layer without any urban classification. This would make it incredibly easy to make custom landclass for every country and also making southern Europe finally a bit more dry.

Will report back as soon as I did some flights. Thanks for doing this, I was about to start a similar task since I was fed up with the terrain in FS9. OSM World made my day. Maybe I will start a basic landclass file if I get to it. Since it only needs vegetation classification this should go much faster than a complete one.

Another tip: Please start with Asia, Australia, North-America and South-America and Africa! ;-)

Cheers,

Andreas

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I suspect your problem with EURW_22_Libobj_excl.bgl is one of scnery area priority. Since the OSM world 1 core is supposed to go BELOW all scenery areas including the defaule EURW (FS9/scenery/EURW) it will not exclude lib objects there! if you place it on top, SHAZAM! it kills everything! I am including this file because sometimes roads will cross airports, and they bring light poles with them (I have a little add-on that places cars too, so...). These are library objects that can be excluded only using the "All objects" option... Another solution was to exclude VTP scenery instead, and it worked, but you'd have no nice roads right besides the trminals, they will abruptly terminate a few distance away from the airport! please check your library priorities. I instead preferred exclusion rectangles that may also get rid of trees and buildings too close to the runway thresholds (FS9 vegetation is oversized for performance reasons).

Go to OSMWorld 1 Core/Docs, there is an image depicting exactly how your library needs to go!

Also, I am glad you are testing this with FS9 Evo, As I have been tracking its development closely (and it is breathtaking).

There is a sort of base land class, in the OSM world core too! It makes sure that new areas that extend out to the sea (and therefore end up in the default water class) are instead covered by a mix of two types of forest in a noise pattern (NEVER use vast extents of sam-type class to avoid tiling). I may need to recheck if I covered all inland lakes there... some recent flights indicate I may have not!!

Other continents may come if I decide to go over the oerdeal again! tyook almost a year for this one!!! I should have learnced programming to make an auto-converter instead...!! For personal reasons, a Vol.2 will likely be south America. North america gives me goosebumps only imagining the amount of raw data!!

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I would like to test this too! I am always looking to improve my FS9 and I would be very interested indeed to see how it works with Evo. The somewhat lacklustre roads and coast data available has alway bugged me!

I also second Andreas's suggestion of starting with Asia for your second package - there is almost no LC available for it that I am aware of.

Regards,

Sascha

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I suspect your problem with EURW_22_Libobj_excl.bgl is one of scnery area priority. Since the OSM world 1 core is supposed to go BELOW all scenery areas including the defaule EURW (FS9/scenery/EURW) it will not exclude lib objects there! if you place it on top, SHAZAM! it kills everything! I am including this file because sometimes roads will cross airports, and they bring light poles with them (I have a little add-on that places cars too, so...). These are library objects that can be excluded only using the "All objects" option... Another solution was to exclude VTP scenery instead, and it worked, but you'd have no nice roads right besides the trminals, they will abruptly terminate a few distance away from the airport! please check your library priorities. I instead preferred exclusion rectangles that may also get rid of trees and buildings too close to the runway thresholds (FS9 vegetation is oversized for performance reasons).

Ah, thanks. That explains it and makes sense. I rearranged the scenery and it works now.

Also, I am glad you are testing this with FS9 Evo, As I have been tracking its development closely (and it is breathtaking).

It is indeed breathtaking for what we're used to in FS2004 before. Particuarly Autogen density and night lighting is fantastic.

There is a sort of base land class, in the OSM world core too! It makes sure that new areas that extend out to the sea (and therefore end up in the default water class) are instead covered by a mix of two types of forest in a noise pattern (NEVER use vast extents of sam-type class to avoid tiling). I may need to recheck if I covered all inland lakes there... some recent flights indicate I may have not!!

What I basically mean is the following (and please feel free to correct me if I write something dumb):

Your OSM World delivers landuse (city/urban) polygons that are very precise in where an urban area is and where there should not be any. It basically contains all the urban information we need to be able to more or less know where we are if we know an area (in combination with roads, rivers, ponds, railways, etc). In between the polygons there should be no urban areas (and in Europe OSM is quite precise in that matter, and you even have small villages in your data).

Hence, in-between the polygons of OSM World there is empty space and this empty space is filled by the landclass (either the default crappy landclass of FS9 or an addon such as Landscape Germany). This land-classification contains both natural areas AND urban areas. The latter, the urban areas, however, are not needed anymore since the urban areas are defined by your OSM World polygons. But, both your urban polygons and the landclass mix and as a result you get urban areas were there should be none.

The solution would be to make a land classification that only contains information about where there are forests (does OSM World contain forest information?), where there are fields, etc but no urban classes. Your OSM World Polys would always override the landclass if needed. Of course, it wouldn't make sense to only use one class as it would be a repetition-nightmare and would look ugly. But, on the other hand, making a full landclassification that would include natural as well as urban classes is extremely time consuming, and compared to your polygons, would not realistic (in the sense of FS9) anymore (after trying OSM World). So, I will try to make a small area with only landclasses within the next week or so and will post some screenies.

Hi Mario,

I would like to test this too! I am always looking to improve my FS9 and I would be very interested indeed to see how it works with Evo. The somewhat lacklustre roads and coast data available has alway bugged me!

I also second Andreas's suggestion of starting with Asia for your second package - there is almost no LC available for it that I am aware of.

Regards,

Sascha

Hehe, not unexpected! :-) Its no conventional landclass but vector landclass which makes it much better! Coming back to the story of the greenish Spain, a new land classification is needed and we have FS9.9.

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I would like to test this too! I am always looking to improve my FS9 and I would be very interested indeed to see how it works with Evo. The somewhat lacklustre roads and coast data available has alway bugged me!

I also second Andreas's suggestion of starting with Asia for your second package - there is almost no LC available for it that I am aware of.

Regards,

Sascha

Beta tester #4 you are welcome!! and what a tester did I get here!!

Andy,

If you know how to make a new landclass, go ahead! I tried to see time ago using GlobCover data, and just looking around it appeared to be a complicated task. You'd have to remove urbanization areas from it, possibly with some kind of algorithm that replaces it with the closest neighbor pixel...

I however am not keen to remove all urban depiction from the default landclass, as OSM may not cover certain areas (it is superb in some areas, some others are so-so). Also, this scenery uses only 3 types of textures. HiRise for large areas, Urban non-grid medium dry for the rest, and urban grid medium dry for industrial. I wanted to use urbann grid large dry for the industrial, bu7t it appears to crash FS9...

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If you know how to make a new landclass, go ahead! I tried to see time ago using GlobCover data, and just looking around it appeared to be a complicated task. You'd have to remove urbanization areas from it, possibly with some kind of algorithm that replaces it with the closest neighbor pixel...

I however am not keen to remove all urban depiction from the default landclass, as OSM may not cover certain areas (it is superb in some areas, some others are so-so). Also, this scenery uses only 3 types of textures. HiRise for large areas, Urban non-grid medium dry for the rest, and urban grid medium dry for industrial. I wanted to use urbann grid large dry for the industrial, bu7t it appears to crash FS9...

I can see your point and its looks brilliant even with a landclass such as landscape germany, were urban areas are present. I will see what can be done with GlobCover and the Corine data. Should be no problem to remove the urban classes and replace them with something else.

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- Streams and Waterbodies overlap. This looks strange since (probably depending on water settings) a river can be seen through. If possible a water body should "kill" a river ;-). Here's a screenshot (hope it can be seen):

In TMF Viewer it becomes more clear:

- Overall, I get the impression that all rivers are too low / too deep within meshes? Is it possible to let the rivers follow the mesh?

- Reykjavik city is missing some polygons and hence is not complete. It seems that on OSM there are city polygons for the whole city. So maybe you forgot to process a specific city polygon from the OSM data or it wasn't included in the downloaded OSM data. The screenshot shows Reykjavik with custom landclass that does not contain urban landclass, so it really only shows city data of OSM World (Which was what I wanted). Screenies (No 1 with custom landclass and OSM world landuse polys, no 2 from openstreetmap.org):

Hope it helps!!

P.S. If you guys are interested in testing the landclass for iceland you are welcome to send me a PM for the link. It wil be freeware eventually and adress the issues of southern Europe. It was done with and for FS9 Evo but should work with any other texture set and will also work with OSM World (including a version without urban class for OSM enjoyment).

Cheers,

Andreas

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Andy thanks for all. Indeed data is from Geofabrik... I will try and see how tedious is to process "buildings" layer too! If the buffering algorythm allows me to process these in a decent amount of time, then it could serve muche reliable urban polygon results!

change offset=0 for both the streamline entries (although OSM World Western Europe makes use only of texture.1024)

So far:

I will reduce the width of the larger roads (will take TIME)

I will attempt to process "buildings" to better the quality of the urban polygons. (If processing times are humanly possible, I'll do. Will take loads of time!)

If a second coverage area will ever come to fruition, it will probably be south America... covering the entire planet by myself will result in everyone running P3d v5.0 by the time I am done... maybe a community effort is coming along!

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